Rosario
+ Vampire is a fairly typical "fan-service"
heavy series
focused on a central male character (in this case, with the name
Tsukune) being
surrounded by a large number of women who are desperately
head-over-heels
attracted to him for some strange reason. Based upon the popular
manga series
by Akihisa
Ikeda,
this is a silly and offbeat series.

Plot-wise, the show takes place
primarily at the
Yokai Academy. Tsukune is a normal student and human teenage boy
who doesn't get
into the school he applied to and it bizarrely results in his
parents finding a
downright strange and quite random school admissions letter for
admission into
a school that none of them had ever heard of... Tsukune might
have gone to a
normal school if only he had gotten better grades.

It turns out that
the Yokai Academy is no ordinary
school. It's a school for monsters, created by monsters, and run
by monsters. This
means it has a multitude of strange students that aren't exactly
human-beings.
Tsukune had no idea what he was getting himself into by
enrolling in the
school. Can he survive the weirdness?

The Characters:

Tsukune is a sort of standard,
normal teenage guy
who doesn't really stand out as an overwhelmingly huge
"ladies-man" but he
somehow attracts all of the ladies anyway. Viewers are pretty
much expected to
just watch the show and accept that tons of the school's female
students are
attracted to him. His character is never given much of a
developed story and he
is mostly just seen at the surface-level. He never fully shows
interesting sides
to his personality that would be absolutely distinctive, other
than the
characteristic of being caring for others. I guess he seems to
like the girls
enough, as nosebleeds (all so common in anime) are frequently a
result of what
he encounters. I wouldn't say that the series seriously
considers him as having
a legitimate companion candidate in any girl besides the central
female
protagonist.

Moka is the main female protagonist
who has her
eyesight on Tsukune in the anime. Considering the massive
Vampire craze of the
past several years, it comes as no big surprise to see an
increase in supernatural
and vampire series. Her character isn't a standard-type of
vampire at all. She's
sweet, kind, and caring. Her personality is an interesting
offset to the
typical expectations most might have for a vampire-imbued
storyline. She has
long, flowing, pink hair and a magic locket that looks like a
cross, containing
the power built up inside of her vampire-side. She can transform
into the
powerful vampire-form when the locket's removed (which makes
Moka have a more
pronounced appearance with silver hair and a stronger build). As
Moka
transforms, everyone witnesses her gain a tough attitude,
confidence, and a butt-kicking
ability frequently needed to save everyone on the show from
troublemaking monsters.

In addition to
Moka, there are many other central
female characters on Rosario + Vampire that have
affection for "heartthrob"
Tsukune. They are named Kurumu, Yukari, and Mizore. Kurumu is a
succubus who is
able to use powerful charms. Yukari is a witch who can use a
variety of spells.
Mizore is a snow fairy with the ability to control and freeze
ice and snow. Almost
every episode consists of them all fawning over Tsukune in an
attempt to try
and defeat the odds and win out against the rest of the girls in
a quest for
his affection. Each
character is given a
different type of personality and appearance. Kurumu is
enthusiastic, cheerful,
and playful. She is voluptuous and has blue hair. Yukari is
immature, annoying,
short, flat-chested, overly energetic, and yet almost like the
sweet younger
sister to the other girls (as she is several years younger than
the rest of the
girls on the show). She is almost always wearing a brown witch
hat, has short
brown hair, and uses a pink heart-shaped wand. Mizore is the
most laid-back of
the bunch and she has some indifference towards Tsukune at the
beginning of the
show. As the series progresses, she seems to desire Tsukune's
attention just as
much as the rest of the girls. She has purple hairdo, frequently
wears a belt
around one leg (for whatever odd reason), almost always has
stockings on her legs,
and she is characterized through being shy, popping up in odd
random places
(for instance, behind everyone else in a bush), and she seems to
be a somewhat
sad person when compared to the other characters. Besides Moka,
she is probably
demonstrative of having the most caring personality on Rosario
+ Vampire.

The Set: Season 1,
Episodes 1-13:

Rosario + Vampire wasn't exactly what
I was expecting. For starters, I was hoping that the series
would turn out to
be an entertaining show. The opposite's true during its
introductory season.
There just aren't enough worthwhile elements to Rosario + Vampire to warrant the time expenditure
for something so
characteristically repetitive, dull, and altogether ready to
disappoint.

The
best element of the series during its introductory season is the
fact that it definitely
had a worthwhile premise to work with. The entire idea
surrounding having a
school made up of weird and zany monsters in human-form is silly
and seemed to
be something that could find humorous moments with relative
ease. The premise
of the show stands out as something a bit different and
interesting.

There
are several elements to the animation that I found somewhat
peculiar. The
character designs are actually really well-done, absolutely
distinctive, and
not at all repetitive for the lead characters especially. The
animation can
sometimes impress in terms of lone moments of animation, done
with high-quality
artistic merit. The flipside of this is that the background
animation seems
boring, dull, and without clear focus. The show rarely
emphasizes anything
outside of the characters and "fan-service" moments. It could
have benefited
from creating a more unique world for the Yokai Academy. It's unfortunate that it never quite
manages to create a
more compelling environment for the show's quality concept.

The production values of the series
are also at
fault. The animation isn't anywhere near as fluid as one might
expect. Instead,
there are countless scenes where it seems as though a poor job
was done at animating
the series through too much emphasis on extending some of the
drawings into far
lengthier moments than necessary. It's as though the series was
a "motion-moving"
manga at times - rather than a "motion-moving" anime. It's an
oddity in that
there already is a manga to read for Rosario + Vampire
if people so
choose to read it. The whole point of the anime should be to
successfully
translate the manga by Ikeda and form an entirely fluid anime experience. Rosario
+ Vampire's animation
isn't terrible, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

There
are far more areas where the series doesn't seem to be living up
to its full
potential. The music score was nice enough but nothing from the
score really
stands out afterwards. The songs used for the opening/ending
credits are
somewhat annoying techno-pop tracks, and the vocal tracks used
throughout the
series sound nice enough but don't actually add anything extra
for story or
characters. It's almost as though the show goes into an
auto-pilot music mode
when the writers sense that the story doesn't have enough
material to successfully
create an entire episode without some added moments like these.

The
series features too many weak scripts during its first season.
The biggest
drawback is how almost every single episode is resolved in the
exact same way.
It makes for a pretty disappointing experience to see
essentially the same plot
ideas reused repeatedly without much to differentiate things.
The main idea
presented was that one of the bad monsters from the school tries
to attack all
of the central characters and Moka has to transform to save the
day in her
full-vampire form. Tsukune removes her
magical jewelry, and leaves everything else to her. That is
exactly how almost
every episode of the first season ends.

Not only is the series repetitive on
several levels,
but the humor itself isn't anywhere near as humorous as the show
seems to think
it is. The jokes are frequently without laughs and the puns are
too silly.
Sometimes the attempts at humor seem to be created simply be the
show
attempting to be as weird as possible. The weirdness of it all
is meant to make
us be able to laugh as an audience but it doesn't work that way.
Worst of it
all is an unfunny bat that appears to tell viewers unnecessary
information
(such as the length of battle scenes).

The
last thing that wasn't good about Rosario + Vampire is the biggest issue of it
all. This series
is seriously perverted... and not in a good way. Like
most anime series
with lots of fan-service aplenty there is an abundance of
sexual imagery that
is used throughout the show. While it's typical for these
types of shows to
include scantily clad teenage girls it's weird that the show
added a young girl
to the cast with the witch Yukari. She's clearly a little kid
and this type of
character has no place being in a show like this one. The series actually
has moments where it is
sexualizing her with imagery that shouldn't belong with the
rest of the series.
Rosario + Vampire has countless scenes where all of the
main cast (only
for the female characters, of course) are wearing short skirts
that blow in the
wind and are otherwise shown to some degree. This leads to an
enormous amount
of shots of panties. The weirdness factor really begins to be
too much when the
show actually shows Yukari's panties and starts dressing her
up in different
revealing costumes with the other characters. Yuck. I should
probably also
mention the newspaper guy, Ginei, who is a big contributor to
the school newspaper
club that all of the primary characters choose to be involved
in... he becomes
one of the central characters over the course of the season
but shouldn't have
been one considering his favorite hobby of being a notorious
peeping-tom, harassing
girls on the show by stalking and taking photos of them. Yet
somehow this is a
character that the writers just expect for the audience to
accept as part of
the main group of characters without ever questioning it
beyond mere acceptance
of the character. This is another huge mistake that is
detrimental to the show.

Rosario
+ Vampire had some
interesting ideas and showed viewers some
potential, but it didn't live up to its premise and all the
elements that
arrive with it. It just wasn't all that good as a show and it
had some negative
aspects that really undermined elements which could have been
considered
noteworthy.

The
DVD:

Video:

Rosario + Vampire has been given a
pretty impressive presentation from Funimation. The colors are
vibrant and the overall
image remains clean, crisp, and reasonably sharp. While this
wasn't the most
impressive PQ that I have seen a Funimation DVD release
contain, it certainly
ranks among the better releases to date in this area and it
won't disappoint fans
hoping for a nice release. The series has been presented in a
16:9 broadcast
aspect ratio, preserving the widescreen image with anamorphic
enhancement.

Audio:

The audio was generally impressive
as well. Both the
English 5.1 Surround Sound mix and the Japanese 2.0 stereo
options would be worth
listening to. The English surround is better in terms of the
use of sound
effects and expanding the music score and songs. The dubbing
was pretty
impressive as well for the English version. The Japanese dub
is good too,
though, and is going to be worth keeping as a preference for
those who prefer
to listen to any anime with the original dub version. English
subtitles are
provided.

Extras:

The only extras included on this
release are
text-less songs for the opening/ending credits and trailers
for other
Funimation releases.

Season 1 of Rosario +
Vampire has been released as a Limited Edition which includes
an art-box and
artwork booklet. The art-box is big enough that when the
packaging filler is removed,
the Rosario + Vampire: CAPU2 second season set can be
placed alongside
the first season set packaging to form a more complete
collection package.

Please
note
that Rosario + Vampire: CAPU2 is sold separately.

Final
Thoughts:

Rosario + Vampire just
wasn't all that good. That's
a nice way to put it. The characters are barely given time to
develop into interesting
characters that viewers can connect to (which seems essential
for this type of
show to completely work) and the comedy can seem a bit lame
most of the run-time.
The jokes are also too repetitive and so are the plots. Skip
It.